


comedy of masks

by marketchippie



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Consensual Disguise Spells, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 06:55:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16614059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: In which Jester makes a case, vividly, for seducing the captain.





	comedy of masks

As it turns out, the quartermaster’s cabin is marginally more comfortable than the first night’s floor. Vera kept an unsurprisingly austere quarter: he has a hammock to himself, a desk, the spoils of past journeys accruing here and there in the corners. Only a little blood on the floor, tracked in on past days’ boots.

Fjord thinks he might fall asleep easily at the end of these days, were he not so wary of what’s to come when he closes his eyes. As it is, he latches the door, lays himself down, and feels his skin itch, near-tender with alertness. The knock at his door sends him bolting upright, feet to the floor.

He clears his throat—thus far the captain’s never yet come to seek him out in his own smaller quarters, and why would she? “At your service,” he begins, but when he opens the door it is not Avantika waiting for him.

“I don’t think you were listening to me,” says Jester, blithely, as if they had been in the midst of talking, and strides into the room under his arm. There is a chair at her desk, which she ignores; there is an untapped barrel of rum with the Dwendalian Empire’s requisitioning stamp in the corner that she hops onto instead.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” she says. “You should really listen to me about these things. I mean, I am the expert.”

“Sorry,” he says, wondering if he’d fallen asleep after all, “expert in what now?”

“Fucking,” she says, and he chokes on the back of his own throat.

“Please,” he says, more or less steady. “Catch me up on what you have in mind.”

“I told you,” she says. “I think you should seduce the captain.”

“Ah,” he says, as neutrally as he can.

Not admitting you’re ahead is the directest way to win a race, he’s found. There’s no reason for the Nein to worry about what he gets up to with the captain, whether in her quarters or in his dreams. Behind his eyes the captain flashes—her nails scoring his scalp, her teeth nipping his lip; then ahead in the dream-water, fish-sleek, chasing the same thing he’s been set after—as in front of him Jester kicks her feet against the barrel, the fluffed-up edge of her skirt kicking up over her calves.

He really, _really_ does not want to talk about this.

“I don’t think she’s going to talk to the rest of us.” Her nose squinches. “She’s so superior, you know. It’s always _Fjord,_  only _Fjord, quartermaster Fjord, do this, quartermaster Fjord, look through that spyglass, hey, Fjord, it’s the quartermaster’s job to take off your shirt and cart these barrels with your bare arms, probably, Fjord_ — ” A faint blue flush deepens the color high on her cheeks. “Well, anyway,” she says, before he can point out the fact that the captain’s never asked him to shed clothes in mixed company, ( _Uk’otoa and whatever other things that might be worth praying to, have mercy_ ) “we have to use what advantages we have. I learned that from my mother. Which isn’t all I learned in her house.”

Her chin tilts up, all adopted authority. Well, she would be, on this—conceptually, that is. Much as she’s talked about her upbringing, he’s tried not to think over her potential skills too much. First of all, he’s outclassed on this matter; second, he values his ability to look her in the eye.

At the moment, that’s far too much to ask. He bites his tongue down rough, as if he could scrape off the memory of the captain’s skin underneath. At the very least, he can do Jester the courtesy of keeping her the only other person in the room.

“I’m not much good at that sort of thing.”

“But that’s what I mean!” she beams. “I’m terrific at it. I mean, I’m definitely the best of us.”

“At,” he says, slowly, carefully, “seducing.”

Jester nods. She’s not looking at him. “Technically you could call me an expert. Technically.”

He thinks of her prayers, her notebooks. Her paints, now, too, and the thought almost makes him smile: the world is her canvas, and maybe it might not be so bad to be one of her works. “This is a theoretical exercise,” he says, and can feel the ground slipping underfoot. The boat rocks against an oncoming wave and her smile widens. “We’re going to—I mean, you can talk me through it, I guess, but please, Jester, I don’t think I’d do you much credit.”

“You can learn,” she says, firmly, more to herself than to him, “if you want to.” With a swift, brief motion, she kicks her feet against the barrel and hops back into standing, and he doesn’t think about the flutter of her skirt and he doesn’t think about her gasping deep at the bottom of the well, and he definitely, no question, doesn’t think about the captain. When he’s backed into a corner, even if he’s backed himself there, he tends not to think at all.

Until the captain’s standing in front of him.

He flinches back, grabs the edge of the desk. There’s Avantika, in the flesh, more or less: her eyebrows have a special, wicked arch, the scar on her cheek is a little deeper, the red of her hair glows, enchanted with the luster of flame. One hand reaches up, before the rest of him thinks better of it.

“Jester,” he says—and it comes out like a question, even though he knows, even though it has to be, even though he has nearly the same skills. It takes even less from him: less than a whisper, less than the flick of a hand. But it’s uncanny all the same, looking at her, the way she rests her hand on her hip, the way she kicks one boot over the toe of another. He has to raise his eyes. The top of Jester’s head would come up to Avantika’s tattoo. The wrong eye for contact. Swallowing, he looks up, avoiding the dip of shadow below. “This is a bad idea.”

“Why?” she asks, planting the other hand on her hip, and her voice is still her own, lilting and joking and familiar. A voice he’d listen for in the dark of the Sour Nest, to remind himself who he was meant to be. He nearly jumps. “It means you’ll know what you’re doing, when it matters. Obviously _this_ doesn’t matter,” she says hastily. “It’s only friendly to share what you know.”

 _You don’t need to do this,_ he wants to say. The captain stands similar to that but she doesn’t tap her toe like that, doesn’t purse up her lips as she waits. The captain waits for nobody, not him and not any of the rest of them; the captain asks for what she wants in clear words and clear gestures and a steady hand on his. _I didn’t need to be taught in advance._

But the last thing he needs is the ragtag mess that’s supposed to be his crew—or loyal, anyway, to him, if not obedient or bidden to him maybe instead something passing for fond—looking sideways at him, wondering how many eyes look out from his own. Even he doesn’t quite know the answer to that.

The last thing he wants is Jester to turn her back on him.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. The face isn’t hers, the body, the, he supposes, desire. If she promises, he has no reason not to believe her.

“All right,” he says. “Show me what you think I need to—”

 _Know_ is on the tip of his tongue, but then so is she, her lips square on his, her body—or the one she’s borrowing—in his arms.

She doesn’t kiss like Avantika, that’s for certain. She doesn’t kiss like she’s drowning, either. Here on land, she’s soft and responsive and for all her big talk she doesn’t have the captain’s precision, but she’s sure about her intentions all the same. She kisses like she’s leading him somewhere, a light on a dark path ahead.

“Lesson one of _seducing a pirate_ ,” she says, pulling back so fast he jars back with her, raising her voice and a slim brown finger in a gesture that’s all Jester underneath, “you never forget the element of surprise.”

“Yeah,” he says, ragged-edged. “Not sure of my prospects in that. There’s a real chance that she—that the captain would get the jump on me if I tried to lay one on her like that.”

He tries to say something like what he means without giving himself away completely, without thinking of the captain’s papers scattering and her hands pinning him down, the wanting-more and the surrender. He worries about what happens if he surrenders too completely: this is at least a way to keep his head above water, probably.

The Avantika in front of him shrugs, eyes toward the sky, the look Jester wears when she’s getting something over on someone. “So maybe you try something slow.”

She tilts up her chin, eyes meeting his. “I’m Captain Avantika,” she says, dropping her voice low, honeying it and sharpening it and almost getting it right. “ _Look at meeeeee_ , the scary murdering pirate of the high seas with the coat full of knives and the hair that always looks good in the wind.” He snorts, and she plants her hands back on her hips, thrusts out her chest. He can’t help thinking about how he knows what’s beneath the captain’s coat as she does, feels it like an itch in his palms. “I could kill _all your friends_ at _any time_ , unless _someone_ will kiss me like they mean it.”

He meets her eyes, then drops his gaze. His hands anchor on her hips—Avantika’s hips—but find themselves unsettled there, or  the silky twists of hair that are just a little too fine and bright, or the cheekbones that are just a little too sharp. He settles for hands on bare shoulders that could be anyone’s bare shoulders, for closing his eyes and just for a moment, not thinking.

“Like that,” he says, pulling back. Then when she doesn’t reply, and because looking her in the eye is an agonizing proposition and, even, because it’s true, he dips back in and kisses the side of her neck, the side he knows the captain favors when she’s sighing, when she gets as close as she gets to vulnerable. He draws a finger down her throat, tugging the scarf down to trace the eye below.

The tattoo Jester has dreamed up for her glitters luminous, imaginative gold. When he traces a fingertip to the edge, it blinks.

“Hells, Jester!”

She bursts out laughing, and the laugh is her own. “You should see your face.”

The captain has never once smiled at him like this, unguarded and bright and wide-eyed. He takes a step back. The fearless kindness on her face is far uncannier than the illusion, than any blinking eye.

“Come back here,” she says, tilting her head and letting the fall of red hair cascade against her shoulder. She runs her fingers through it and grins into the feeling, like she’s getting used to it, like she’s enjoying the little details. Something in his chest warms. The next breath comes a little easier. “We’ve got a while to go.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, quiet in spite of himself.

Some wickedness returns to the grin, in a way that looks a little more familiar, and her hands smooth a familiar path over her arms and shoulders, and then she’s not wearing any of Avantika’s clothes, nor her own.

The body underneath is almost right, the way the voice was, when she was trying. That is, it looks like it’d—feel right. There are scars she doesn’t know about, tattoos she hasn’t seen, tattoos she’s invented that even in illusion are drawn in Jester’s clever, slapdash hand. She steps back toward him, within reach.

“I meant what I said,” she says in her own voice, catching for a second. “I want to show you everything. There’s nothing I can’t do.”

She takes his hand, and for a moment twines her fingers in his. This too is new, the press of her palm and the curl of her thumb against the crook of his. For a moment, he wishes it wasn’t the captain’s hand—given this isn’t exactly the captain’s M.O. When he looks down, he tries to see the fingers blue against the green, to turn the world to rights again.

Then she guides him softly to bare skin, familiar and unfamiliar, and lets him rediscover terrain he already knows.

Sort of.

To a certain extent, he can replicate what he’s done, what in all likelihood he’ll do again, what the captain responded to. To a certain extent, he wants the same thing, the overwhelming softness and heat of skin on skin, the eventual plea for release. His mind doesn’t leave him the way it did, eventually, with the captain: he is never subsumed. Instead, he pays attention, minutely.

The body is different—and the force inside it is day to night. The way she looks at him, not as if she would devour him, but as if she’s learning him and the knowledge is important to her. Sure, he thinks, it’s work, or it’s meant to be work, even if they’re not brokering a transaction. The grin on Avantika’s face when she gets his shirt over her head, a little gloating, but altogether without cruelty. The gentleness of her touch, the hands pretty sure of where they’re going but maybe not sure how to get there. That, he can recognize from experience.

“What do you think you’d do,” she asks, voice slipping in and out of the accent, and he remembers what not to do himself. What he won’t do now is: say anything. He focuses, kneels, kisses the curve of the hip and the flare of a bright, glittering tattoo—

“Is this a kraken?”

“Oh just go along with it,” she huffs, and he laughs against her skin, and that’s a new one for the books too.

Every second is reaction, every breath a new affirmation. Her voice is clearer, her touch softer: she doesn’t leave marks, doesn’t tug at his hair. His head feels light when he comes up for air, half with dizzy confusion and half just plain spun out with need. He thinks of the figures on the temple wall, the human shapes blurring into each other; he thinks of the Jester inside of the Avantika and his vision goes fuzzy, although that might just be the fact that she’s finally put her hand in his pants.

“I mean,” she says, “I don’t know that you’re learning anything new here. You probably know this one already.” She gives a wicked cackle that’s almost right, whether or not she’s doing it in imitation. When Avantika comes, she’s pitched back her throat, she’s sunk her nails into his chest and laughed with palpable triumph. Jester’s version of it is wicked and vindicated but not the same. He can’t quite isolate the difference.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” he says, suddenly abashed. It just about kills him, too, thinking about pulling back from her hand. It’d take work, too, work his hips are already doing, need like a tight-strung wire running through the core of him. His voice comes out rough enough that he hardly has to work at it. “If it ain’t of use—”

Her fingers curl in tight, and she’s grinning again, like she knows him better than she knows himself. Like she’s drawn him like this, dick out—and for a second he can see Jester so clearly behind the smile, in it.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “What do you think is the point if not to get you here? And come on, you deserve a good ending.” She grins up at him. She’s dropped the accent again, and the uncanniness of Jester’s bright eyes and bright voice breaking through the crafted vessel of the captain nearly breaks his composure, let alone his concentration. He closes his eyes and leans in, pressing his face to her shoulder, the curve of her neck.

In his ear, she whispers, in her own voice: “You’re doing a really good job.”

That’s what undoes him, shuddering into her hand.

Not much of an effort—he’s done better by the captain already, he knows that. Maybe that’ll work in his favor, then: who’d be impressed by this? He’s a very unimpressive student; he hasn’t shown he’s learned anything worth a damn in the last hour. Of all the nobodies in the world, who’d believe there’s a god and a woman both trying to get their claws into him?

An odd weight settles in his bones. He doesn’t want to pull back, to look at the body she’s wearing or the girl inside, whose life he’s saved, who’s saved his. For a moment, it is enough to breathe into the warmth of her collarbone, to feel her stroke his hair. To pretend that no one needs or wants him for anything more than this.

Her fingers slip down the back of his neck and he tenses—at this point with the captain he’s usually remembering to watch for knives. He’s thinking a little clearer now, and there’s no threat in the room, he doesn’t think. Just the tip of her finger tracing with an artist’s curiosity over the muscles of his shoulders. 

“I mean,” she says after a while, still a little breathless, even if he didn’t acquit himself to much. “you’re probably going to have to last longer with the captain. Do you want to go again? I can help. There’s lots we haven’t covered and I don’t want you to be unprepared.”

“Jester,” he says with half a laugh and half a groan, “it’s going to be all right. Whatever happens, it won’t be on you.”

When he pulls back, he tips her face to look at him. The expression on the captain’s face unsettles him—maybe Jester doesn’t know what she’s doing with the features, to look so mournful. It troubles him to see a portrait of Avantika painted with a troubled heart. Makes him wonder about the painter.

“I should think it would be _on me_ ,” she says tartly. “If you woo and win and ravish her terrifying body, I certainly hope that you will be thinking about this the whole time.”

A faint tell of a blush on her face. Not her face. The captain does not do that.

He swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll be thinking about it, all right. There’s nothing much you can’t make real, is there?”

She pulls back, in a move so abrupt it leaves cold air in his arms. “It’s a blessing,” she says airily. The look of intensity fades. Her chin’s back in the air. “Really, it was nothing. Don’t you go getting hung up on it,” she says with a glare so piercing it fair backs him to the wall. “It’s a kindness I have to spare.”

“No kindness is unworthy,” he says, and he means it. “Least of all none of yours.”

The captain’s eyes, Jester’s eyes in the captain’s face, widen. She opens her mouth, then thinks better of whatever’s on the other side. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she says and makes a hurried gesture that sends her back into her own skin, her own clothes. Somehow, in pink petticoats against blue skin, she looks nakeder than a second ago. Her cheeks are deepest blue as she turns her face, half at a run to the door. She waves over her shoulder. “Sweet dreams, Fjord.”

The door swings open, shut. He is left alone in the cabin with a dry mouth, his dick still out, a hand half raised in the air. He tucks himself away very slowly, and it gives him no sense of clarity. Only the odd weight in his bones stays with him, the exhaustion too unlike a night with the captain. Part of him wishes she had the captain’s nails, the desire to flex them til she draws blood. But that’s not Jester, not on purpose, anyway. As much as he can account for Jester’s comings and goings, her sense of limits and limitlessness. Plainly, there’s plenty he doesn’t know.  _What just happened?_

He steps to the door to lock it. Just for a second, he darts his head out to check the hallway. Anyone could be listening. Bad if it was the captain, worse if it was their friends.

For a moment, he thinks he sees eyes in the dark. For a moment, they come with a smile, beneath a hood. A low laugh tracks up his spine, and he thinks in a voice not fully his own and not the one that bends him to submission:

_Yes, she is a blessing, isn’t she?_

Then Fjord blinks and the hallway is dark and empty, nothing but the slow rocking of the ship underfoot to disturb his peace.


End file.
